Tbree Vital Problems 



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Edwin Heyl Delk 



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THREE 
VITAL PROBLEMS 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST 
CRITICISM 

THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE 
SOCIAL CRISIS 

THE CENTRALITY OP CHRISTIAN 
FELLOWSHIP 



BY 

EDWIN HEYL DELK 



PUBLISHED FOR THE AUTHOR 
BY THE 

LUTHEEAN PUBLICATION SOCIETY 

PHILADELPHIA, PA. 






Copyright, 1909, 

BY 

EDWIN HEYL DELK. 



© 8EP#dt»09 

ICI.A 246572 
SEP 17 1909 



THREE VITAL PROBLEMS 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST 
CRITICISM. 

I. 

What is offered in this paper is a purely 
personal interpretation of the present rela- 
tion existing between Biblical Criticism and 
Theology. It is presented with the hope that 
this imperfect attempt to blaze a pathway for 
myself may aid other and better equipped 
minds to lead us into a true solution of the 
problem. 

It is perfectly clear to the Biblical student 
that we first have to deal with the question 
of origins and sources of the Bible. This 
discipline has been called The Higher Criti- 
cism, and secondly we have to consider the 
validity of fundamental Christian dogmas, 
which I have ventured to designate the high- 
est criticism in order to place before you 
my idea of the theologian's truest reading of 
Holy Scripture. I hope my phrase, ^'the 
highest criticism," will not offend the nice 
technical sense of the trained theologian and 



4 THEEE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

apologist, as I do not press the phrase as a 
better or a permanent piece of terminology 
for the class room or learned treatise, but 
simply as a suggestion that there is a deeper 
and richer reading of literature than the dis- 
tinctively historical, biographical and docu- 
mentary forms which of necessity must fur- 
nish the materials for a philosophy of history, 
ethics and religion. 

I confess there is a practical aim which I 
have in view in offering this tentative sug- 
gestion of the hour. I believe there are many 
educated laymen and theological students 
v/ho have been confused by the destructive 
claims of the naturalistic school of Higher 
Critics, and whose beliefs and preaching will 
become nebulous and inefficient unless they 
have the clue to the maze which is offered 
by a candid reconciliation between the proven 
results of the best Biblical criticism and 
Christian theology. One can form an opinion 
upon the amount of consternation and de- 
pression caused by current destructive Bibli- 
cal criticism only from personal experience. 
Just what mental hesitation and spiritual ob- 
scuration there may be in one's own town or 
circle of acquaintance will largely determine 
our estimate of the real departure from tra- 
ditional belief in the world generally, but I 
venture to assert that in university circles 



THE HIGHER AXD THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. 5 

and in cultured centers of thougM there is 
far more of hopelessness and agnosticism con- 
cerning Biblical problems than the average 
student and preacher are aware. Thoughtful 
and conservative men are silent concerning 
doubt and their perplexities touching the vital 
beliefs of mankind. The Bible for many men 
is now an unused book because of the un- 
settled battle going on between the conserva- 
tive and radical critics. '^We will wait," 
say they, ** until this battle of the giants is 
over, and then when the origins, the history, 
the authorship, the legislative codes and the 
revelatory features of Old Testament criti- 
cism are settled, we will take up the old book 
again and read it in the light of its scientific 
reconstruction." My plea is that no man has 
to wait until the battle of the critics is over 
before he studies the Bible, but that now, as 
in all ages of the Church, he may find in 
God's word a perfect revelation of all the 
essential elements of a genuine religious faith. 
That the Bible is a neglected book no man 
who is conversant with the domestic and bus- 
iness life of the average American can deny. 
Its neglect is not due to our modern break- 
neck speed, or deficient church-going habit, 
nor to any disrespect for religion in its true 
sense, but partly to this conflict of expert 
opinion concerning the genuineness and 



b THEEE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

authenticity of the docnments making up the 
Bible, and above all, the fear of a certain 
odium theologicum which is visited by un- 
wisely zealous pulpiteers and provincial 
church assemblies upon the good faith of in- 
dependent students of Biblical literature. It 
is because so many good men have '^ thrown 
the baby out with the bath/' that we should 
seek to discover a true via media between 
the hostile camps, or rather, seek to enter into 
the citadel of our holy faith without which 
neither the destructive critic nor the tradi- 
tionalist can hold the theological field. 

There are two branches of what is called 
Biblical Criticism. First, a study of the vari- 
ous texts or manuscripts used in determining 
the received form of any Biblical book. This 
is called the Lower Criticism; secondly, a 
study of the canon of Scripture, the genuine- 
ness, the authenticity, the date of composi- 
tion, the structure of the book, the character 
of its content, the question of inspiration, and 
the revelation made by God in the book — this 
second discipline is called the Higher Criti- 
cism, or, still better. Historical Criticism. It 
is called higher because more momentous 
issues are involved and a higher order of in- 
vestigation is needed to settle the mooted ques- 
tions of the documents under examination. 
Both disciplines are carried on by reverent 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. 7 

Christian scholars, and no words of oppro- 
brium should be hurled at either group which 
is working out in a scientific spirit the ques- 
tions which appear in their distinctive fields 
of research. 

There is nothing irreligious in a man try- 
ing to solve the problem, *^Did Moses write in 
its present form that group of five books 
which the Jews called the Torah, and which 
modern Biblical students call the Pentateuch, 
or in the student's conclusion that the book 
of Joshua should be added to the other five 
historical books descriptive of Israel's history 
and that this Hexateuch be studied as a whole 
in determining the true course of Hebrew his- 
tory and theological development. True, this 
is but one problem in historical criticism 
out of the many which present themselves for 
our solution, but the consideration of the 
others may be approached in a spirit of rev- 
erence and faith quite as genuine and rich as 
that exercised in the study of any question 
in the lower or textual criticism of the Bibli- 
cal books. Much of the ^^hue and cry" which 
has pursued historical criticism is due to a 
lack of discrimination in apprehending the 
philosophy and spirit of individual higher 
critics. 

The real student will not forget that the 
late Prof. Delitzsch of Leipzic, Dr. "William 



8 THKEE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

Henry Green of Princeton, and Dr. Theo. 
Zahn of Erlangen, practiced the Higher Crit- 
icism just as truly as the radical Kuenen of 
Holland, Dr. Driver of Oxford, Prof. Briggs 
of New York, and Adolph Harnack of Berlin. 
These men differ not so much in method as 
in philosophy and results. The revolutionary 
and destructive conclusions of a Wellhausen 
should not be charged to the whole body of 
historical critics. A vast amount of unneces- 
sary alarm might be avoided if we would 
pause to consider the fundamental philosophy 
of each man essaying to offer us a solution of 
problems in historical criticism — asking our- 
selves whether he is theistic or atheistic in 
belief— a believer in miracle or a pure natu- 
ralist. 

We are not beyond making the blunder of 
confounding a purely naturalistic interpre- 
tation of Biblical history with a theistic, de- 
velopmental interpretation of Jewish thought 
and life. The two points of view are radically 
different. The purely naturalistic point of 
view eliminates all belief in a supernatural 
interposition in Hebrew history, and, in con- 
sequence, any true idea of Eevelation. To 
naturalism the history and religious ideas 
presented by the Hebrews were due to purely 
human struggle and thought. That Israel 
presents a unique and finally commanding 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. V 

body of ethics and religious thought is de- 
clared by the most radical of critics, but this 
they attribute to the peculiar racial genius 
for religion, like the Greeks for philosophy 
and the Romans for law. To make the whole- 
sale charge that all higher critics are of neces- 
sity naturalistic in their philosophy is wide 
of the mark. And this is what is constantly 
being done by apologists for the traditional 
interpretation of Old Testament history. A 
recent clever and popular monograph Avritten 
by a brilliant Scotchman entitled ^^The Integ- 
rity of Scripture," contains this charge 
against the Higher Criticism : ^ ' The truth is, 
the whole hypothesis is naturalistic. It grew up 
on that soil. And the attempt to introduce a 
duly toned-down and graduated presence and 
entrance of God into a naturalistic scheme 
is beyond the wit of man. God makes an ab- 
solute beginning. He starts on His own 
plane." Now, it is just this kind of misun- 
derstanding and misstatement I wish to 
scotch. If I understand the evident conten- 
tion, it is a denial of any revelation of God 
less than the instant absolute truth, or as the 
writer phrases it, ^'He starts on His own 
plane." That I deny on historical and psy- 
chological grounds and in contradiction speak 
the words of the writer of Hebrews: ''God 
having of old time spoken unto the fathers 



10 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

in the prophets by diverse portions, and in 
diverse manners hath at the end of these 
days spoken unto us in His Son/' Of the 
naturalistic and anti-theistic schools we make 
no defence. These schools seek no readjust- 
ment to establish creeds or confessions. They 
are frankly anti-supernatural and press their 
various dissections of the documents and the 
development theory to prove a foregone con- 
clusion in philosophy. There is, however, a 
developmental process in revelation as there 
has been in creation, in anthropology, in lan- 
guage, in literature and government. St. Paul 
tells us that ^Hhe times of man's ignorance 
God winked at. " It is no detraction from the 
absolute holiness of God to declare that He 
must have adopted a pedagogic method in 
His revelation and in His training of Israel. 
For the literalist whose conception of inspira- 
tion is a verbal dictation by God to a sacred 
writer, and who is likely to claim, further, 
that he has a copy of the original autographs 
of prophets and historians, any theory of the 
development of sacred literature as well as 
natural life involves hard and damaging ad- 
missions. Fortunately neither the Bible nor 
the Church in her ecumenical creeds has at- 
tempted to define inspiration. But if our 
theory of inspiration is fitted to the facts as 
declared by an unbiased criticism, there are 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. 11 

as many difficulties eliminated from our 
Christian interpretation of Jehovah as from 
the interpretation of the historical contradic- 
tions of the various books. If God was limited 
by the intellectual and moral material with 
which He had to deal, then of necessity there 
had to be a progressive revelation of His ab- 
solute will and purpose. If His method of 
material creation was by a slow process of as- 
tronomical and geological development, and if 
the method of development was not aban- 
doned in the creation of the low^er orders of 
animal life and of man, why should we ex- 
pect that in the sphere of revelation alone 
there would be an immediacy and absolute- 
ness out of keeping with all earlier processes ? 
God speaking in man is not a different God 
from God speaking in nature. True, it is a 
fuller, clearer, diviner expression of spiritual 
truth which God gives to us by the prophet 
and apostle, but everywhere His revelation is 
conditioned by the development of the me- 
dium through which He speaks. 

The aim of historical criticism is to get at 
the real facts. The traditional view started 
from a theory, and the hard problems which 
the Bible forced upon it were explained away 
in accordance with the theory. The higher 
critic will not admit a theory which prevents a 
free investigation of the factSo He wishes to 



12 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

know all that is ascertainable about the au- 
thorship and analysis. His first results are 
inevitably negative, and so far, if one pleases, 
destructive. But the positive and constructive 
results must be undertaken. The higher critic 
is busying himself, with more or less success, 
in the great problem of restoring Old Testa- 
ment literature to its proper place in history. 
In considering effects upon belief, the 
otherwise important questions of authorship 
have no place. It is absurd to confuse author- 
ship with inspiration, as many seem to do. 
There is nothing in the Old Testament which 
more fully meets the tests of inspiration than 
the great prophecy in Is. xl. to Ixvi., but this 
does not depend upon its assumed Isaianic 
authorship. The prophet in Israel cried, 
''Thus saith the Lord," never once, ''thus 
say I. ' ' The " I " was of so little consequence 
that the prophecies were commonly published 
without the name of the author. The impor- 
tant matter was the message, not the messen- 
ger. But in the days of the decadence of Ju- 
daism the passion for authority led to the 
invention of authors for literature which was 
until then anonymous. Laws were assigned 
to the great legislator, Moses, poems to the 
great poet, David, wisdom to the famous wise 
man, Solomon, and prophecies to the greatest 
of all the prophets, Isaiah. 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. 13 

With many of the conclusions of individual 
critics I am in open discord. I simply plead 
for fair play in the field of scholarly research. 
Calling harsh and ugly names will accomplish 
no good, nor settle any scientific question. At 
the first reading, for instance, of Prof. 
Briggs' volume, ''The Study of Holy Scrip- 
ture, ' ' one is irritated at times by the brusque 
contradictions of old-time ideas of Biblical 
sources, and his attempt to be popular as well 
as scholarly excites a sense of dissatisfaction ; 
but for the body of the work one is forced into 
the attitude of respect, despite the shock of 
his statement that legendary and possibly 
mythic material is interwoven with the 
prosaic facts of Israelitish history. Such ques- 
tions as the composite character of certain 
books, the earlier or later position of certain 
Psalms, the elaborate or more primitive forms 
of law enunciated by Moses, the individual or 
tribal significance of certain names, the exis- 
tence or non-existence of a complicated ritual 
for the Tabernacle, the relative importance 
of the priestly code as over against the ethical 
and profounder concepts of the prophets, 
and the questions arising from the final revi- 
sions under Ezra — ^however important and 
interesting such technical questions may be 
to the higher critic, for the apologist and dog- 
matician they are secondary. For us a pro- 



14 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

founder consideration is at stake, i. e., how 
is the higher criticism related to the highest 
criticism — ^the essential dogmas of our Chris- 
tian faith? Let me give the answer of the 
author already mentioned. Prof. Briggs says : 
* ' Apart from the interests of history, it makes 
not the slightest difference, so far as the 
teaching of the Bible as to faith and morals 
are concerned, how greatly the proportions of 
fact and fiction, of the real and the ideal, may 
be changed in the progress of Historical Crit- 
icism, so long as the great historic events upon 
which our religion depends remain unim- 
peached. To impeach the historicity of the in- 
carnation and the resurrection of our Lord 
destroys the Christian religion. Some critics 
seek to do this by the use of Historical Crit- 
icism; but Historical Criticism is really the 
sure weapon which God has put into our 
hands to vindicate everything which is really 
historical. Historical Criticism enables us 
successfully to sift the entire material and 
to separate the wood, hay and stubble of hu- 
man opinion from the gold and gems of the 
real historical and everlasting city and king- 
dom of God." 

The highest criticism seeks to penetrate to 
the heart of history and biography, to grasp 
the central and essential principles and pur- 
poses of an age or literature. A multitude of 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. 15 

surface contradictions does not deter this type 
of mind. The main lines of development are 
traced through a maze of historical detail. 
There are two ways of reading even one his- 
torical writer. One may devour the work 
piece-meal to remember dates, figures, 
speeches, battles and striking sayings of kings 
and statesmen; or one may try to seize upon 
the character of the age, the general move- 
ment of the times and the great characters 
influencing the institutions of religion and 
government. Both elements are valuable in any 
true writing or reading of history, but surely 
the latter is more important though more dif- 
ficult of interpretation. The first unrevised 
sheets of such works as Macaulay's or 
Fronde's, falling into the hands of a philo- 
sophic student of history, might have been 
found to contain slips in dates, or numbers in 
an army, the surname of a statesman, an ideal- 
ized portrait of some favorite king, a variant 
statement of an earlier speech, but no minor 
contradiction would have blurred for such a 
student a vivid idea of the personalities en- 
gaged in the historic action, or the effects of 
certain reforms, or the thrill produced by 
certain brave words, and the general atmos- 
phere and spirit of the age. In the study of 
Shakespeare's '^Hamlet" the student does not 
feel that he has lost hold upon the man Shake- 



16 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

speare wishes to present, because our modern 
play is a composite work made up from the 
quarto edition of 1603 and the folio edition 
scratched down by secreted reporters or taken 
from imperfect stage copies of the play. The 
highest criticism does for the word of God 
what the philosophic student does for the raw 
material of history and literature. It seeks 
to seize upon the main sweep of historical and 
theological development and organize all 
dogma under the final test of Christ 's author- 
ity and spirit. Now the Higher Criticism is 
feared by many because they anticipate that 
the fundamental dogmas of Christianity are 
jeopardized by its investigations and result- 
ant truth. But the work of such men as Prof. 
Zahn, the positive declaration of faith made 
by Prof. Briggs, should put at rest the fear- 
some apologist for essential Christianity. 



II. 

It would be impossible for me to present 
in extenso the many specific applications of 
my thesis in this short paper. But I venture 
to indicate the independence of Christian 
dogmatics in the face of the generally ac- 
cepted results of historical criticism. I shall 
merely suggest the viewpoint of the highest 
criticism in the department of theology 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. 17 

proper, anthropology, Christology, soteriol- 
ogy, the kingdom of God, eschatology and 
Christian ethics. 

The fact should ever be borne in mind that 
our Christian theology is not based on the 
earliest and cruder ideas of Jehovah given to 
us in certain statements of writers in Genesis, 
in Kings, or in imprecatory Psalms. We take 
the Old Testament as a whole and gather those 
large ideas of God — His oneness, His holi- 
ness, His justice, His mercy. His guidance of 
Israel in the ways of righteousness as revealed 
in the history of the Hebrews and the great 
utterances of His prophets. The story of His 
walking in the Edenic garden at eventide and 
the vision of His hinder-parts by a prophet 
need not disturb us by their anthropomor- 
phism. The moment we discover the sources 
of such conceptions and the status of the 
audiences to which they were addressed, the 
incongruity of it all with our modern idea of 
a spiritual and invisible Godhead is ex- 
plained. Indeed historical criticism comes 
to our aid in a more vital way to explain some 
inadmissible moral conceptions of Jehovah 
as presented in earlier Hebrew literature. A 
perfect record is not essential to the Christian 
faith ; but that human conception cannot com- 
prehend the fullness of God's absolute holi- 
ness ought to be at least as fundamental to 
2 



18 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

the Christian as it was to Isaiah. If we value 
the Bible not less but differently, the change 
has its more than ample compensation in the 
unspeakable gain in our idea of God as en- 
tirely free from poor human expedients, or 
from the imperfect morals which give way in 
the brighter light of each succeeding age. 
The truth is, our Christian conception of God 
gets its true valuation by contact with the 
cruder ideas of the early Hebrews and the 
less spiritual views of the chronicles of their 
history. Our modern idea of God is based on 
the revelation of the Father as made by Jesus 
Christ. The foolish vogue of Ingersolism 
would not have had a moment's standing be- 
fore any modern student of Old Testament 
criticism. The traditionalist was worried be- 
cause he refused to acknowledge the admix- 
ture of human imperfection in presenting the 
divine nature. Christian theology stands free 
from all primitive conceptions of the deity 
and ties its theory and conception of God to 
that revelation of His character and purpose 
which is revealed in the words, the life, the 
death and ascension of Jesus Christ. The 
world-wide interest of God in His children 
and their feeling after Him, if haply they 
might find Him ; His entrance into all history 
and the many flocks to be gathered at last into 
the one fold ; His perfect incarnation in Jesus 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. 19 

Christ and His indwelling in every humble, 
devoted heart ; His solicitude, love and suffer- 
ing as declared by Calvary — all are facts in- 
dependent of any question of monotheized 
Babylonian legends or law code of Hammu- 
rabi. If the contention of some radical his- 
torical critics should be proven true that the 
earlier chapters of Genesis are but parts of 
general Semitic belief, inherited from still 
earlier Oriental thought, it does not affect 
in the least our Christian dogmatic concern- 
ing God. 

In the sphere of anthropology the same 
principle holds true. Whatever theory of 
man's creation may finally prevail — the evo- 
lutionary or that of man's instant and per- 
fect appearance — the facts of his dual nature 
and the mark of the beast is upon him, body 
and soul. Sin is sin whether it is vestige of 
an earlier type of animalism or a fall from 
perfect innocence. Personally I shall never 
smile at the dramatic presentation of the 
talking serpent in the Garden or of the 
forbidden tree of knowledge whose fruit 
has brought such bitter depression of 
soul to the mind and heart of human- 
ity. No better picture has been given us 
of that disobedience of mankind which en- 
tails our moral departure from God and the 
consequent night of agnosticism and ethical 



20 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

wandering. Whether the story be allegory or 
exact history, the heart of it impresses a pro- 
found human truth, to forget which is to miss 
a basal and awful fact in the history of every 
age and every human heart. ^'For all have 
sinned and come short of the glory of God" 
— that is the rock-bottom fact which the hu- 
man soul has to face to-day. The ^4mage of 
God" in which the ancient writer conceived 
God to have made His offspring was distorted 
by a free and conscious choice of a forbidden 
indulgence of the senses, and all after history 
has felt the effects of that original rebellion 
against divine authority and law. But one does 
not have to base his belief in the need and 
possibility of man's return to God upon any 
one incident or chapter and verse in the Bible, 
or upon scientific anthropological study. The 
morning newspapers, the latest problem novel, 
the history of his own life and thought fur- 
nish a man with only too sad a revelation 
that the gross animalism of his nature breeds 
the rankest rebellion against both divine and 
human law. He finds a law written in his 
members, the spirit lusting against the flesh 
and the flesh against the spirit, the whole life 
sick and awaiting the rescue by an outer spirit 
of divine power. Historical criticism may 
help to furnish a record of the history of 
this struggle in a nation and in human hearts, 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. 21 

but modern life and our individual pathway, 
marked with moral wreckage, make us inde- 
pendent of any priestly code to reveal the 
fact of sin. 

I hope that this statement will not provoke 
the charge that the basis of such theological 
belief is simply *^ Christian consciousness/' 
*^ Christian consciousness" may confirm the 
belief, but it is upon Holy Scripture that we 
base the dogma of sin. It is still our su- 
preme rule of faith and practice, despite any 
readjustment of parts and authorship caused 
by historical criticism. ^'Against Thee, 
Thee only, have I sinned and done this evil 
in Thy sight," may be a portion of a post- 
exilic psalm rather than a pre-exilic plaint, 
but the central guilt of sin which it indi- 
cates is true w^hether written by David or by 
some stricken soul in Babylon. As the true 
function of the prophet is apprehended it 
makes but little difference to systematic the- 
ology whether there be one or two Isaiahs. 
The whole book gets its worth from its pro- 
found insight into the human heart with its 
burden of guilt and that richer vision of 
the coming Saviour — that Servant of God 
who shall redeem Israel. Undoubtedly, 
historical criticism has modified our idea 
of prophetism, and the time of the w^riting of 
certain books we once considered pre-exilic, 



22 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

but none of these negative and constructive 
theories of prophetism touch the fact of 
Israel's apostasy, suffering and promised re- 
demption. The book of Jonah may prove one 
continuous parable, but the universalism of 
God's interest in man which it is intended 
to teach is quite as true in form of parable 
as in act of history. The truth revealed in 
the story of the Prodigal Son is just as real 
as the truth depicted by Paul of Eoman 
animalism and Corinthian vice. 

In the sphere of Christology there are many 
phases of the Messianic idea presented by 
historical criticism both of the Old and the 
New Testaments. Two streams of tendency, 
one ethical and the other apocalyptic, flow in 
varied volume, through the Bible. Historical 
criticism has not made the problem, it has 
discovered it and is seeking to solve it. But 
whatever diverse atmosphere surrounds the 
Messianic idea, we have no insuperable diffi- 
culty before us in securing a portrait of the 
historical Jesus and the enlarging conception 
of His personality as laid bare in the syn- 
optics and St. John's gospel. The more ob- 
jective portrayal of Mark, as over against 
the metaphysical prologue of John and the 
dialectic of Paul, does require adjustment and 
dogmatic perspective in order to secure unity 
in development, but this task the highest crit- 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. 23 

icism is sworn to accomplish after the higher 
critic has disposed the material in some his- 
torical order. In a sense it is a matter of small 
import to the theologian whether Mark stands 
first in the order of production or Matthew, 
whether there was an original ^^Logia" of 
Matthew written in Hebrew, around which 
our present gospel is built, or whether Luke 
bases his gospel upon a carefully selected 
body of the earlier documents as he claims, 
or wrote his gospel at first hand. It would 
be a matter of profound satisfaction if once 
for all we could determine the Johannean 
authorship of the fourth gospel, but the man 
w^ho believes it is true and contains a revela- 
tion from God in Jesus Christ, goes to it as 
confidently as to a Corinthian epistle of St. 
Paul's. The nature, the life, the work, the 
wonder-working power, the crucifixion and 
resurrection of our Lord are great outstand- 
ing facts despite all textual puzzles, conflict- 
ing genealogies and difficulties of chronology. 
Within the sphere of Christology there are 
problems enough, some of which are occa- 
sioned by a more searching historical criti- 
cism ; but their ultimate solution will not be 
accomplished in the region of letters, but in 
a science that is pressing forward into the 
mysteries of birth and of the human spirit. 
Neither John nor Paul alone can give us a 



24 THEEE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

full-orbed delineation of the person of the 
Son of Man and Son of God. It is enough for 
us that out of the dust and heat of modern 
controversy over authorship, documents and 
dates, there rises in His divine majesty the 
sinless, loving, suffering triumphant Christ 
of all the ages. 

In the study of soteriology it would be a 
cause of profound congratulation, if the crit- 
ics could assure us beyond cavil which of the 
so-called Pauline epistles were genuine. It 
would be a study of peculiar interest to trace 
the influence of Jewish legalism upon Paul's 
conception of Christ's vicarious sacrifice, but 
the real vital saving power of Jesus Christ is 
as effectively declared in one epistle as in 
another. Paul's legalistic phraseology is but 
an incident in his portrayal of the actual work 
of redemption as wrought in the cross and ap- 
plied by grace through faith. Justification by 
faith in the crucified and risen Jesus — that 
truth burns in and through every expression 
of the great apostle to Jew and Gentile. Only 
fore-gleams of it are found in the gospels, 
but the relating of the earlier expressions of 
our Lord Himself to the elaborated presen- 
tation in Romans and Hebrews is done by 
the highest criticism, irrespective of the pri- 
ority of the documents, or the diverse point 
of view of James and Paul. Our own higher 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. 25 

critic, Luther, found James a ^^ strawy epistle" 
just because he was not quite theologian 
enough to appreciate the two types of mind 
as exhibited in Paul and James. Yet no man 
has presented such a vital soteriology as 
Luther, wrung as it was out of a bitter per- 
sonal experience in the face of an open Bible. 

I hope the student will not imagine that I 
desire to minimize the importance of his- 
torical criticism or exaggerate the indepen- 
dent attitude of theology, any more than the 
civil engineer making his survey for a great 
trunk line can ignore the facts of geology and 
topography. He both yields to and conquers 
the rock strata, mountain masses and courses 
of streams, but with the one end of utilizing 
all the conditions for building a sure and 
direct road-bed for the traffic of a continent. 

"What is true in the application of one prin- 
ciple in the other main divisions of dogmatics 
is true in the realm of the kingdom to be es- 
tablished. There are seemingly contradictory 
ideas running through the synoptics concern- 
ing the nature of the kingdom to be set up. 
From one point of view the kingdom was to 
be an endless, slow, but sure spiritual con- 
quest of the world. From another standpoint, 
it was to have a sudden, apocalyptic establish- 
ment and triumph. In their own generation 
the apostles looked for the second coming of 



26 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

Jesus with great glory and majestic pomp. 
They were to sit on twelve thrones judging 
Israel. Slowly the more spiritual and ethical 
view, the deeper conception of the kingdom of 
God, dawned upon the disciples. These di- 
vergent views emphasized by historical criti- 
cism do not obscure the real character of the 
kingdom of heaven itself. The method of the 
establishment is one thing, and the nature of 
the kingdom itself is quite another. So the 
highest criticism goes patiently to work to 
define the character of that organization of 
righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy 
Ghost which Jesus established without cohorts 
of descending angels, or the slaughter of op- 
posing Eoman proconsuls. The greatest in 
that kingdom is he who serves, its insignia 
are not titles of master or lord but world- 
wide brotherhood and humility. However 
varied the emphasis between ^Hhe kingdom" 
of the gospels and the ''ecclesia'' of the epis- 
tles, practically, the fair-minded student has 
no difficulty in working manfully in the 
Church for the larger aim of the world-wide 
dominion of the kingdom. That kingdom is 
first subjective and cometh without observa- 
tion, but like all inward convictions and 
impulses it seeks to actualize itself in an ob- 
jective organization and propaganda of the 
faith. 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. 27 

The doctrine of the ' ' last things ' ' also finds 
its conclusive teaching from a higher point 
of view than a purely Biblical theology — that 
is, if no allowance is made for a progressive 
development of the idea of immortality. 
Here, if anywhere, the Old Testament must be 
abandoned for proof texts, and one must take 
the high and impregnable ground of the 
words and resurrection of Jesus Himself. His 
doctrine of the *^ eternal life'' is quite dis- 
tinct from Hellenic and Old Testament gleams 
of personal immortality. It is the far richer 
union of the believer's spirit with the person 
of our risen Lord which makes, here and now, 
the ^'eternal life" possible, and which com- 
pletes it by likeness to Christ when He shall 
appear for the final judgment of the world. 

It is in the realm of ethics, especially, that 
the modern Christian student must rest in 
Christ's promise of guidance '4nto all truth" 
by the Holy Spirit. Historical criticism has 
been of great aid in clearing the field of 
Old Testament conceptions of morality, but 
after all, in our return to Christ and His 
dominance in history we find our sure guide 
and inspiration in the moral life. It is in the 
person and career of our Lord that we 
receive the truly creative ideals and forces 
of the ethical life. Not in the casuistic 
wrangle over seasons, and meats, and rites of 



28 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

Hebrew or early Christian sects, but in the 
pure, courageous, all-loving Christ of the gos- 
pels do we draw the principles and precepts 
for the writing of a moral philosophy and 
the practice of a righteous life. Through 
the attraction of actual life and the guidance 
of the Holy Spirit, practices once tolerated 
are no longer tolerable, and all the finer vir- 
tues of the Christian centuries are based on 
surer ground than the disputations of the 
past, however sacred. 

I have had two practical intentions in view 
in entering upon this frank expression of 
opinion. I see a danger confronting preach- 
ers and students. They will be likely to lose 
the forest in the study of the trees. The 
preacher must take the artist's view of the 
forest, not the botanist's method of approach. 
We need the botanist and his herbarium, but 
we need more the timber for shipbuilding and 
the waving greenwood for recreation and 
landscape. Let both student and preacher re- 
member that the Higher is not the highest 
criticism. For the sake of all that is vital in 
faith and precious in life, we should omit 
denunciations and applause of higher criti- 
cism from pulpit addresses, and preach the 
simple but profound gospel given us by 
Jesus. 

Again, there is a danger that a mental de- 



THE HIGHER AND THE HIGHEST CRITICISM. 29 

pression and groundless antagonism to schol- 
ars in this field of inquiry will be generated 
unless we secure the higher point of view in- 
dicated in this crude sketch. Many of us 
have had little time to read the latest and 
best works in Biblical criticism. It is a far cry 
from Scrivener's book to that of Weiss and 
Driver, but the field must be gone over afresh 
if our knowledge is to be true and our pulpit 
ministrations are to reach intelligent men. Of 
course, the average man cannot do the nice, 
original work of a Zahn and Moore, but keep- 
ing our heart warm and our head cool we can 
follow their lead with this clue to the maze 
which I have sought to set forth. We may be 
assured that whatever critical readjustments 
of date, authorship, structure, inspiration and 
prophetism may be required by a conserva- 
tive and scientific criticism of our Biblical 
sources, the foundations of the Christian faith 
and life are planted in the eternal ^^Word'' — 
Jesus Christ. Christ has truly voiced the pur- 
pose of all the sacred writings — ^'Ye search 
the Scriptures, because ye think that in them 
ye have eternal life ; and these are they which 
bear witness of me; and ye will not come to 
me that ye may have life. ' ' Let us not stand 
indicted by these words, but, coming unto 
Him, read all Scripture and life from out 
the divine communion vouchsafed us by a 
risen Lord. 



30 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

I like the words of that scholar-preacher, 
Maclaren : ' ' He who lives in Christ, and has 
Christ living in him, may well possess his 
soul in patience amidst the dust of present 
critical controversies as to Scripture, its man- 
ner of origination and its authority. He will 
have the witness in himself; the springs of 
his faith and of his life lie too deep to be 
frozen or evaporated. Such believers do not 
rest their faith on the Book, for they have 
verified in its experience, and can say even 
to the Bible, ^Now, we believe, not because of 
thy word, for we have heard Him ourselves, 
and know that this is indeed the Saviour of 
the world.' " 

A living personal experience of the power 
and presence of the indwelling Christ is a 
tremendous advantage in these times of re- 
lentless sifting. Without it, one who sees the 
solid beliefs of ages shaken to their very cen- 
ter, and what he considered to be the rocks of 
historical fact about to crumble beneath his 
feet, is in a position of great peril. It is an 
unspeakable help to one perplexed by the 
conflicts of critical scholarship to be able to 
fall back upon the definite revelation of Christ 
to his soul as Saviour by which he was 
ushered into the kingdom of God; and more 
helpful still, to have the assurance of present 
union and communion with the divine Christ. 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE 
SOCIAL CRISIS. 



There has always been a Church. There 
has always been a social order. The Church 
and the age have always acted and reacted on 
each other. I use the word Church in the 
broadest sense. Wherever men, moved by the 
religious instinct, worshiped God in some or- 
ganized way — pre-eminently in Hebrew and 
Christian forms of belief and cults — ^there we 
have a Church. In apposition to the Church 
we always find a social order with its do- 
mestic, industrial, political and moral status 
in which the Church lives and moves and 
which she affects for good or ill. 

Sometimes the Church has been cotermi- 
nous and identical with the social order about 
it. In a word, there have been times when 
we might say the State is the Church or the 
Church is the State. Such was ancient Is- 
rael's constitution and such was modern Rus- 
sia up to the creation of the Douma. 

Sometimes the Church is isolated and in 
intense antagonism to the age in which it 
(31) 



32 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

exists. Such was the situation in the first two 
Christian centuries. Roman licentiousness 
and Augustan imperialism made any alliance 
and identification of the nascent Church with 
the State impious. The dream of a national 
Church was possible only as the Roman Em- 
pire became Christian in profession and so- 
cially regenerate. 

The normal relation of the Church to the 
age is that of a moral and religious dynamic 
leading and transforming the social organism 
and spirit. Unfortunately the Church has not 
always been pure and disinterested in her 
life and attitude. Instead of strenuously seek- 
ing to redeem society, the Church, in certain 
ages, has been busy enriching a few of her 
eminent ecclesiastics, contending for temporal 
jurisdiction and destroying freedom of re- 
ligious thinking by fagot and excommunica- 
tion. 

If a pure Church were the only factor at 
work, the world would soon become the king- 
dom of God, but there are other factors at 
work more or less selfish and sensuous in 
principle against which the Church has to con- 
tend and which she must transform in spirit 
before we dare look for social peace and 
righteousness. We have first of all the do- 
mestic, industrial, political and religious in- 
stitutions, bequeathed from pagan and semi- 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 33 

barbarous times. Social customs and com- 
mercial practices which are antipodal in spirit 
to Christianity still confront the Church and 
challenge her to vindicate her claim to sanity 
and superiority of idea and ideal. There is 
a body of modern philosophy and forms of 
education which are frankly positivistic in 
principle, or agnostic as regards all religious 
belief. In the face of opposing social con- 
ditions, the Church has done fairly well in 
the redemption of society. 

It is true that every age is a transitional 
period in history. But we are face to face 
to-day, in our own country, with more than a 
transition, we are face to face with a na- 
tional crisis. To sum up the situation in a 
line, I would say that it is the death grap- 
ple between the commercial spirit and the 
spirit of Christianity. Never have wealth 
and luxury on the one hand and rectitude 
and brotherhood on the other been so much 
in evidence. The battle in its industrial phase 
is between capitalism and the proletariat, but 
in its deepest antagonism it is between God 
and mammon. The Church is supposed to 
stand for the worth of man rather than the 
worth of material greatness. It is a time for 
a thorough heart-searching on the part of 
the Church and a clear understanding of her 
duty in the present social crisis. 
3 



34 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

I. 

First let us consider some of the distinctive 
features of our age. Modern industrial or- 
ganization has called forth one of the Church's 
most difficult problems. There was a time 
when master and man worked side by side at 
the same bench, in the same shop. The ap- 
prentice was a member of the household. A 
few tools owned by the workman himself were 
quite sufficient to make the simple implements 
of the farm and household. The spinning- 
wheel, or hand-loom, in the house of every 
middle class householder made possible the 
industrial independence of most families. 
The village blacksmith, miller and butcher 
provided for the material wants, and fur- 
nished food stuffs for the isolated hamlet. 
But all this simple industrial form of living 
was changed by the introduction of machin- 
ery. Few men were able to purchase the 
machine which made ten yards of cloth in a 
day while the hand-loom produced but one. 
Only the well-to-do man could erect a build- 
ing and install machines which could turn 
out five hundred pairs of shoes an hour while 
the same twenty-five workmen with hands 
alone could make but one hundred pairs in 
twelve hours. Men now had to seek work 
where they could find the machinery. The 
machine, or rather the owners of the machine, 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 35 

were the directing factors in the labor-world. 
The wages and the condition of labor were 
determined by the factory owners. Grad- 
ually certain centers of milling, of cutlery, 
of woolens, of shoemaking, of textile manu- 
facture, were established, and the agricultural 
areas were drained of their most energetic 
blood. The cities, with their tall factory 
chimneys and congested populations seeking 
work, became the mart of human labor. The 
individual laborer stood no chance in bar- 
gaining for a wage. He took what he could 
get, or was turned from the factory to secure 
the occasional job or to enter the ranks of 
the unemployed. Then came the rise of 
trades-unionism. There was a bitter struggle 
for its establishment. It was called harsh 
names and treated as a crime. The movement 
was fought by capitalist and every social con- 
servative who saw in the rise and organization 
of the artisan class the appearance of an in- 
dustrial force and political power which 
would endanger the vested privileges of 
manufacturers and landed proprietors. 

In order to control trade, the separate man- 
ufacturers formed corporations, and these 
corporations were finally merged into com- 
mon trusts which limited the output of the 
pooled factories and practically dictated the 
prices and policies of individual operators. 



36 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

The merging of various railroads into a few 
vast systems, and the corporate ownership of 
our coal fields and their alliance with certain 
of the great industrial trusts, absolutely de- 
termined the sale and price of the common 
necessities of life. In order to secure this 
vantage ground, individual manufacturers 
and independent operators were either ab- 
sorbed in the trust or crushed out of exist- 
ence. Granted that the price of some staple 
commodities was not made excessive, and that 
some of the wealthy individual corporations 
have been able to continue to fight for their 
existence and portion of trade, the general 
fact stands, beyond contradiction, that the 
prices of the necessaries of life have been con- 
trolled and steadily advanced artificially, 
within the last twenty years, so that the great 
middle class and the poor of our great cities 
are not in position to purchase what they 
need of food stuffs, fuel and clothing. The 
vast communal tracts of land once available 
for distribution under the Homestead Laws 
have been practically exhausted. Every year 
the acquiring of land, which is the basal 
economic source of national wealth, by the 
native born and the thousands of immigrants 
seeking a foothold in America, grows more 
difficult. The small farm is gradually super- 
seded by the large farm, and huge tracts of 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 37 

land along our great lakes and rivers are be- 
ing purchased by men of wealth for the crea- 
tion of estates and game preserves or for vast 
agricultural plants. It is prophesied by dis- 
interested economists who have studied our 
American rural problem that we are rapidly 
reproducing the European condition, such as 
we find especially in Germany and England, 
i, e.y the three groups of landed proprietors, 
tenant farmers and agricultural laborers. 
This class division is a menace to social and 
political equality which has been the char- 
acteristic and beneficent foundation of our 
American industry and life. What is going 
on in the rural sections finds its counterpart 
in our great cities. The value of real estate 
in the centers of population is subject to what 
our economists call the ^^ unearned incre- 
ment." That is, without any improvement 
of a residence, store or hotel, the price of a 
building or even a vacant lot may be doubled 
in value simply by the increase of surround- 
ing population. The demand for certain loca- 
tions in the center of residence and trade, the 
growth of a population needing houses and 
transportation, increase the value of prop- 
erty irrespective of improvements or any act 
of the owners of such vacant lots. The poorer 
people become congested in the undesirable 
portions of such cities and the middle class 



38 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

are forced to the outskirts of the metropolis. 
Car fares must be paid which swell the treas- 
uries of transit companies who have secured 
long-term franchises at ridiculously low fig- 
ures and often fail to furnish proper facilities 
for transportation and safety to the baffled 
public. In many of our States the chief rail- 
road controls the legislature just as in our 
cities the trolley monopoly is in secret alliance 
with the political boss and influential coun- 
cilmen. This situation has made possible here 
and there groups of financial pirates who prey 
upon the ignorance of the public. Trustful 
men and helpless widows place their hard- 
earned savings in insurance companies whose 
officers, instead of protecting and increas- 
ing their clients' interests, engage in financial 
ventures with trust funds, direct the policies 
of great banking institutions, draw enormous 
salaries, and float inflated blocks of so-called 
*' industrials" which often collapse and ren- 
der penniless the insured and befooled in- 
vestors. Ex-President Roosevelt has denomi- 
nated the results of this kind of financier- 
ing ^^ predatory wealth" — a heartless wealth 
which demands and secures rebates from rail- 
roads and threatens congressmen and legisla- 
tors with political death unless they acquiesce 
in the demand of such piracy. "We are grate- 
ful that a few intrepid statesmen are awake to 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 39 

the situation, and that onr far-sighted and 
brave ex-President is ready to lead in this cru- 
sade for the control of the directories of our 
great railroad systems, merciless groups of 
coal barons and meat packers. The result of 
this rapid concentration of wealth, real and 
fictitious, has been the creation of exasperat- 
ing luxury on the one hand and a bitter fight 
for higher wages and decent li\dng on the 
other. A recent writer in the Atlantic 
Monthly tells of a society dame who built upon 
her summer estate at Newport, for one even- 
ing's entertainment, a pavilion which, to- 
gether with its decorations, cost $40,000.00. 
The whole affair was dismantled and demol- 
ished the following day. In contrast, on a 
nearby promontory, the villagers of a Portu- 
guese settlement battled on a wrecked steamer 
for fire wood for the coming winter. The 
old-time plea that the $40,000.00 spent upon 
the pavilion went in wages to architect, car- 
penters, masons, upholsterers and florists, is 
no longer an economic justification for such 
barbaric personal luxury. The same amount 
might have built twenty worthy homes for 
the fisher folk at easy rental. It is this flaunt- 
ing of senseless extravagance and barbaric 
luxury in the faces of thousands of men and 
women out of work which has bred the hatred 
and anarchistic spirit in the hearts of our 



40 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

day-laborers. Our poor may not be growing 
poorer, but our rich are certainly growing 
ricber, which just as surely creates the social 
differences between the two classes. Mr. 
Charles Spahr, in his ^^Distribution of 
Wealth in the United States/' says: ^^One 
per cent, of the families in our country hold 
more than half of the aggregate wealth of 
the country, more than all the rest of the na- 
tion put together. Seven-eighths of the fam- 
ilies hold only one-eighth of the national 
wealth." If we want approximate political 
equality, we must have approximate economio 
equality. 

It is useless to claim that the so-called labor- 
ing classes receive the full reward of their 
productive value. For instance, the report 
of the Inter-State Commerce Commission of 
June, 1902, states that from 1896 to 1902, the 
average wages and salaries of the railway em- 
ployees of our country — 1,200,000 men — ^had 
increased from $550.00 to $580.00, or five per 
cent. During the same period the net earn- 
ings of the owners had increased from $377,- 
000,000.00 to $610,000,000.00, or sixty-two 
per cent. Or take industry in the mass, the 
census of 1900 estimated the average per 
capita production at $12.00 to $14.00 per day, 
and the average wage at $1.38. Making all 
allowance for the moneyed value of the 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 41 

shrewd brains that plan and the wills that 
direct manual labor to its greatest productive 
power, the share of labor 's reward is far from 
just and sufficient. 

But it is the physical, intellectual and moral 
result of our present social organization which 
forms the greatest indictment against the in- 
difference and selfishness of those who seek 
to prevent reform in our industrial and com- 
mercial practices. Our periods of prosperity, 
too often based on wild speculation, peri- 
odically collapse and leave millions out of 
work. The men of middle and old age go 
down first because they cannot keep up the 
speed of the machines they work. The self- 
respecting workingman must then offer his 
body and brain to any employer who has an 
occasional job. His family is easily pushed 
over the line which separates honest poverty 
from pauperism. He grows desperate in his 
search for work. His small savings are soon 
exhausted and he either lives upon the labor 
of his children or in sheer desperation resorts 
to suicide. The young are able to face the 
battle, perhaps, until better times appear, but 
even they, on part time, drift to the street 
comers and saloons, the girls become the 
prey of moral vultures and the children play 
in streets and alleys which reek with disease 
and moral filth. The physical, intellectual 



42 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

and moral degeneracy of sections of our city- 
life is the darkest blot on our modern civil- 
ization. 

Our economic policy has been individual- 
ism, or rather, a covert egoism, which is noth- 
ing but selfishness. In the realms of the 
family, the school and the Church a com- 
munistic spirit is normal and operative, but 
the moment men have entered the realms of 
factory, store and stock exchange, the seem- 
ingly innocent maxim, ' ' Competition is the 
life of trade," which, roughly translated, is 
really, ^^Each man for himself and the devil 
take the hindmost," is almost unconsciously 
adopted as the principle of industrial and 
commercial life. This is surely not the best 
basis for social and industrial justice. Splen- 
did as has been the general advance in the 
conditions of living made by the artisan class, 
there are always groups outside the ranks of 
organized labor whose work is just as hard 
and just as poorly compensated as it was 
forty years ago. As regards the conditions 
of labor, in many cases, the situation is worse 
to-day than one hundred years ago. The hard 
and often bitter fight for work, the miserable 
wages paid, the crowded tenements, which 
make modesty and virtue often impossible, the 
resort to drink to dull the world-weary life, 
the vulgar shows of low vaudeville theatres, 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 43 

the easy positions given to women, in certain 
stores, for considerations which compromise 
chastity, all attest that, however encouraging 
may be the financial and social future for a 
large class of our working people, the situa- 
tion as a whole is distressing, and calls for 
something more than mere reform. In the 
upper and middle classes of our land there 
has crept in the moral poison of divorce and 
a hedonistic philosophy of life which is cre- 
ating a new paganism. Some of our literary 
men have given their sanction to the Niet- 
zschean *^ Superman" who tramples under 
foot the ideas of Christian good and bad and 
makes for himself laws of personal conduct. 
True, only a small part of the people have 
sought to theoretically justify their pleasure 
passion by any philosophy, ancient or modern, 
but the practical hedonism of large sections 
of society is only too apparent to any serious 
teacher of ethics or social reformer. Political 
reform can be accomplished when monetary 
interests are involved, but the public as a 
whole do not select or vote for the best avail- 
able men for city and State officials. De- 
mocracy wishes the second best, but not the 
best men as her office-holders. And as for 
the professional politicians of our cities, they 
choose men for us who are amenable to the 
mercenary party organization. 



44 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

In the light of our general social condition, 
I do not wonder that the working people and 
disinherited class, even in our land of liberty 
and opportunity, are slowly but surely turn- 
ing towards Socialism as a remedy for our 
industrial inequality and unrest. And it is 
not only the ignorant and desperate classes 
who are urging and adopting Socialism as the 
only hope for social justice and peace. We 
find not only in English University circles, 
but also in our American centers of light and 
learning, warm-hearted, educated men and 
women who have cast their lot with the wage- 
worker to destroy the reign of capitalism and 
to declare for the abolition of private prop- 
erty and the general nationalizing of natural 
monopolies. There are all varieties of So- 
cialism abroad in the land. It is a term dif- 
ficult to define in the light of all the associa- 
tions professing socialistic principles. Po- 
litical democracy seemed to insure industrial 
democracy. The individualistic economy has 
broken down as a final solution of social ques- 
tions. The disillusionment of the democratic 
enthusiast has taken place, and he turns to 
Socialism as the only remedy which will in- 
sure to the public the mineral wealth, the 
means of inter-state transportation, the just 
distribution of food stuffs, manufactures, and 
the unearned increment upon land. In the 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 45 

midst of this Socialism of the parlor and 
labor union there are fiery anarchistic spirits 
who will not wait for gradual reform, but by 
radical legislation and revolution, if neces- 
sary, insist upon the immediate socialization 
of all the productive and distributive agen- 
cies of modern life. The socialistic program 
is already before us, and woe be to us as lead- 
ers of public opinion, and to our political 
chiefs, if a careful study and practical con- 
sideration of the Socialistic demand is not 
made. The theory is no longer an idealistic 
philosophy of government, but has behind it 
a body of the people fiercely in earnest and 
intensely interested in the outcome of the 
social confiict. The press generally in the 
United States has not given accurate reports 
of the real size of the socialistic vote. Social- 
ism has become the religion of thousands of 
men who have utterly repudiated the Church. 
Some items of its program have already been 
adopted in Germany and England. The na- 
tionalizing of telegraphs, telephones, rail- 
roads, certain manufactures, old age pen- 
sions and other schemes for social betterment, 
have become part of the organic law of these 
states. Many more numbers of the Socialistic 
program will be adopted, but the true signi- 
ficance of this vast scheme of political and in- 
dustrial reorganization cannot be realized un- 



46 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

til the ideas are actualized, and we stand face 
to face with its titanic control of the individ- 
ual life. In our own land the Church has 
been the stanch defender of individualism, 
the divine right of private property in land, 
and frowned upon the radical socialist as an 
enemy of the marriage tie, personal owner- 
ship and religion. In reply the socialist has 
charged the Church with lack of interest in 
the struggle of the poor for better industrial 
conditions, misrepresentation of the motives 
and program of Socialism, and as being the 
ally of vested financial wrongs. 

II. 

In the midst of this social unrest and po- 
litical corruption what part has the Church 
played, and what is her true relation to social 
betterment ? 

First in order of importance is a clear 
vision of the ultimate purpose of the Church. 
Is the Church an end in itself or a means 
to an end? Is her self-preservation and en- 
richment to be the first consideration? Is 
even winning men from sin and building 
them into the structure of the Church the 
ultimate end of her preaching and organiza- 
tion? In answering such questions we can- 
not stop with the answer of the theologian or 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 47 

ecclesiastic. The determinative answer to 
such an elemental question can be taken only 
from the pen of the prophet and lips of Jesus 
Himself. Only by a first-hand reading of the 
Bible in its large purposes and final ideal of 
religion can we find the answer to our ques- 
tion. 

In the Old Testament two great groups 
hold the center of thought — the human race 
and a particular people. The organic idea, 
not the personal idea, is the dominant note in 
the writing of the Hebrew historians and 
prophets. First is pictured the human apos- 
tasy and the promise of redemption, and 
then, when the great human group breaks up 
into tribes, come the Hebrew national apos- 
tasy and the promise of recovery. The dual 
motive of the whole historic tragedy is the 
moral and religious recovery of humanity 
through Israel. The sacrifices, the priesthood, 
the temple, the feasts, the laws, the prophe- 
cies of the Old Testament get their signifi- 
cance in the light of the hope of a restored 
Israel, a redeemed Israel to w^hom shall come 
the outstanding nations for salvation. Of 
course, the individuals who make up the na- 
tion are to be personally righteous, and must 
perform their religious vows, but Jehovah's 
supreme demand of the individual is not for 
sacrifices and fastings, but for those elemental 



48 THREE VITAL PEOBLEMS. 

virtues which men exercise in social life. In 
a word, the prophets emphasized the need and 
demand for public morality. The later relig- 
ious individualism appeared after Israel's po- 
litical autonomy was destroyed by foreign 
conquerors. There is no contradiction, but 
rather a logical development, between social 
justice, truth, mercy and brotherhood, and 
the growth in personal spirituality. What we 
need to constantly recall in this study is that 
when Israel was satisfied to rest in ceremony 
the prophets brushed aside sacrificial ritual 
altogether. ^ ' I desire goodness, not sacrifice, ' ' 
said Hosea, and Jesus was fond of quoting 
the words. Isaiah, when Israel turned to 
sacrifices and temple rites to appease the an- 
ger of Jehovah, in impassioned words spurned 
the method employed. He said, the herds of 
beasts trampling the temple court, the burn- 
ing fat, the reek of blood, the clouds of in- 
cense, were a weariness and an abomination 
to the God they were meant to please. Their 
festivals and solemn meetings, their prayers 
and prostrations, were iniquity from which He 
averted His face. What He wanted was a 
right life and the righting of social wrongs. 
''Your hands are full of blood. Wash you! 
Make you clean ! Put away the evil of your 
doings from before mine eyes! Cease to do 
evil ! Learn to do right ! Seek justice ! Re- 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 49 

lieve the oppressed! Secure justice for the 
orphaned and plead for the widow/' The 
prophets were men dealing with public af- 
fairs; often they were statesmen advising 
kings upon just and honorable conduct of 
government. They were the champions of 
the poor. Professor Kautzsch says: ^^ Since 
Amos it was the alpha and omega of pro- 
phetic preaching to insist on right and justice, 
to warn against the oppression of the poor 
and helpless." The edge of their invectives 
was turned against the land-hunger of the 
landed aristocracy who ^^ joined house to 
house and field to field," till a country of 
sturdy peasants was turned into a series of 
great estates ; against the capitalistic ruthless- 
ness that ' ^ sold the righteous for silver and the 
needy for a pair of shoes" ; thrusting the poor 
freeman into slavery to collect a trifling debt ; 
against the venality of the judges who ^'took 
bribes and had a double standard of law for 
the rich and poor." 

Two things, at least, are made clear by 
these quotations. First, that the religion 
which God demanded of Israel was ethical 
rather than ceremonial; and second, that the 
fruition of the righteous life is social and na- 
tional peace, plenty, justice and mercy for 
all. 

When we come to study the New Testament 
4 



50 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

we naturally turn to the teaching of our 
Lord to determine the true aims of Chris- 
tianity. Human nature is a pretty constant 
quantity, and we find, only a few centuries 
after the establishment of the Christian faith, 
an almost complete obscuration of its original 
interest. Priesthood, organization, sacrifices, 
ablutions, genuflections, bodily torture and 
spectacular ceremonies take the place of per- 
sonal purity and public virtue as the supreme 
ends of religion. 

It becomes, then, a vital matter for the 
Church in all ages to hold to the central 
aim of Jesus in the life of His disciples and 
the purpose of the Church. 

The age in which any man lives necessarily 
gives color and direction to all his thinking. 
Since the French Revolution, the social prob- 
lem has been the growing and insistent prob- 
lem before the people and their rulers. We 
must read the New Testament to-day in the 
light of the modern social changes going on 
about us, or we as Churchmen shall miss a 
splendid opportunity of molding our age by 
the Christian principle. What then was, and is, 
the generic and central idea of Jesus ? I take it 
that the ultimate goal of the Christian propa- 
ganda is ''The kingdom of God." All revela- 
tion, the Incarnation, the Atonement, personal 
salvation, Church and sacraments, all moral 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 51 

discipline and rewards are given with this 
supreme end in view, i. e., that God's kingdom 
may come, and His will be done on earth as 
it is in heaven. The two notes of the kingdom 
are the Fatherhood of God and the brother- 
hood of man. In the first century, especially 
in Jerusalem and Palestine, the Church was 
an organization bound together by these two 
controlling ideas. On the human side, it was 
distinctly communistic in its organization. 
The right of private property was not denied, 
but no man insisted upon his personal rights, 
but had all things in common. Further than 
this, ^Hhey sold their possessions and goods 
and parted them to all as every man had 
need." This practical expression of Chris- 
tian brotherhood was the choicest fruitage of 
their faith and love. It was the test, indeed, 
of the sincerity and genuineness of their loy- 
alty to Christ's ideal of social life. The com- 
munism of the early Judeo-Christian Church 
must not be confounded with the politico- 
economic communism proposed by Kobert 
Owen or his modem disciples. One was the 
spontaneous expression of a religious brother- 
hood inspired by the common love of our 
Lord, the latter was a political proposal based 
on compulsory legislation. The New Testa- 
ment nowhere condemns the right of private 
property in land and things, but on the other 



52 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

hand the failure to see and feel the commun- 
istic spirit which lies at the center of the 
Church's life is to miss the dominant char- 
acteristic of early Christianity. The '^king- 
dom of God" first exists in the heart of in- 
dividual men, but it quickly emerges in action 
and expresses itself in economic and social 
mutuality of interest and life. Why, then, 
did the Church so quickly lose this primary 
aim of Jesus and the apostles? 

At the moment of the emergence of the 
Church from the Judean atmosphere she 
came in contact with Greek thought and Ro- 
man organization. The person of Christ, not 
on His historical, but on His metaphysical 
side, soon became the commanding concern 
of the Church. The intellectual battle was 
soon on. All the subtlety of Greek thought 
was engaged in the conflict upon the prob- 
lem of the nature of Jesus and His relation 
to God and the Holy Spirit. For over a hun- 
dred years the bitter theological fight went 
on. Arianism found its chief antagonist in 
Athanasius. The intellect and much of the 
heart of the Church found its chief energy 
directed in the fight for what was orthodoxy. 
The Trinitarian controversy was followed by 
the Pelagian controversy and a score of other 
metaphysical and psychological battles, until 
finally, the great body of Christian belief was 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 53 

beaten out into systematized creeds called 
ecumenical. In the meantime the idea of 
the Church being the nucleus of the kingdom 
of God almost perished, so that, Augustine's 
*^City of God" was but the vision of a heav- 
enly city descending to earth, not earth trans- 
formed in civic righteousness, joy and peace 
in the Holy Ghost. 

In the Church's contact with Roman life 
and organization another blow was dealt to 
the generic idea of Christianity. Roman im- 
perialism was in absolute contradiction to 
the democratic note of Jesus. But, as the 
Church has always taken color from the na- 
tional organization in which it is planted, so 
the simple note of equality and brotherhood 
of the Judean Church was soon lost in the 
elaborately graded system of the Roman hier- 
archy. The battle between local leaders and 
Roman bishops was fought to a finish. 
Slowly but surely the organization of secular 
Rome became the form for the organization 
of the Church in Rome. The Pontef ex Maxi- 
mus became the Papa or Pope. The splendid 
magisterial organization of the cities of the 
Empire decided the diocesan organization of 
the triumphant Church. Men were busy in 
establishing the Eternal Church upon the 
ruins of the Eternal City. Once more, in the 
process of the spiritual and temporal conquest 



54 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

of Italy and the outlying colonies for Christ, 
His true purpose was lost sight of in en- 
throning and enlarging the Church herself. 
Sacerdotalism, not the Christian socialization 
of humanity, claimed the major part of the 
Church's time and thought. 

Then came the long period of lethargy, and 
the romantic awakening of the Crusades. 
Feudalism rose like a mighty barrier to true 
brotherhood. The Mohammedan conquests 
awoke Christian Europe to a splendid militant 
but futile endeavor to reconquer the tomb 
and land of Christ. The romantic expeditions 
brought back the knowledge of pagan culture 
and art. The wealth of the Church and the 
new commerce with the Orient made possible 
the Renaissance. Now beauty and luxury 
filled the hearts of kings and popes alike. The 
common people and the peasantry were an 
after-thought. So once more the democratic 
communistic note of the early Church suffered 
a rebuff and was entombed in gorgeous ritual, 
and the literary glory of Italian and French 
authorship. Luxury was followed by cor- 
ruption, and corruption by the Reformation. 
Once during that period appeared the Peas- 
ants' Revolt, but it was quickly quashed in 
the more important contest for religious free- 
dom. Then followed the deadening period 
of Protestant dogmatic controversy. Harsh- 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 55 

ness of epithet and bitter factions marked the 
progress of the controversy. Scholastic for- 
mulae were galvanized into life, and the whole 
strength, if not attention, of the Protestant 
Church was given to proving the unprovable 
and setting up of confessional standards prac- 
tically on a par with the word of God itself. 
No wonder that in this wordy fray the center 
of faith was shifted from life to thought, from 
brotherhood to conf essionalism. In later days, 
when a genuine pietism found voice in the life 
of the Church, there came the rebirth of the 
missionary movement in the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries. This, in its inception, 
was dominated by the idea of personal salva- 
tion, the escape from individual sin, a saving 
from eternal destruction and the securing of 
a heavenly home. The sociological idea had 
not yet entered into the missionary propa- 
ganda. The idea was to save heathen men, 
not to transform India or China into a Chris- 
tian brotherhood. Glorious as was the hero- 
ism and splendid as was the martyrdom of 
those who first went out from Germany, Eng- 
land, Scotland and the United States, the 
full significance of the missionary movement 
was not realized until to-day. Missions and 
social progress are now clearly seen to be one 
and inseparable. Every activity and rela- 
tion of man to man is to be transformed by 



56 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

the preaching of the Law and Gospel. A 
world-wide federation of Christian states is 
now the vision created by the missionary prop- 
aganda. The re-emergence of the primal 
Christian ideal is now beyond recall. 

Nearly contemporaneous with the pietistic 
and missionary movements sprang np the 
great revivals, but once more the organic, 
ethical note in religion was overshadowed by 
that of personal salvation. The evangelist 
sought to save the individual sinner. The 
call was to escape from this present evil 
world, and lead the peculiar aloof life of the 
saint. The center of vision was the tortured, 
repentant soul passing into the light of per- 
sonal joy and peace. The world was irre- 
deemably sunk in sin, and the way of escape 
was to flee from the City of Destruction to the 
Delectable Mountain. There is no doubt that 
many branches of the Church were open to 
the charge of preaching other-worldliness 
rather than the duty and joy of redeeming 
society and establishing the kingdom of God 
here and now. There will always be the 
need of evangelism, personal evangelism, but 
the era of the great, organized revival 
having in view the salvation of the individual 
sinner exclusively is a thing of the past. The 
new evangelism has a larger program and a 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 57 

truer ideal of the nature and purpose of 
religion. 

Whatever may have been the need and jus- 
tification, in the past, for the consuming and 
often bitter contention about dogma, forms 
of Church government, ritual, religious ex- 
perience and methods of evangelism, to-day 
one who lays the stress of his work upon the 
past history of the Church has missed the 
mark. To-day the Church stands face to 
face with the great body of the artisan class 
estranged from organized Christianity. A 
vast sea of poverty and crime moves restlessly 
and threateningly about the Church. Some 
of the most hated members of the gigantic 
corporations sit in her pews and give color to 
the type of sermons preached. Many of her 
individual members are unconscious, or in- 
different participants in corporate injustice. 
A calculated or uncalculated selfishness per- 
mits many of our great civic and religious 
benefactions to languish. Here and there 
some noble, rich man realizes his stewardship, 
but the vast body of our American wealth is 
still unconsecrated to God. The vision of the 
one family in Jesus Christ has nearly perished 
in many congregations. The world-idea of 
the kingdom of God seems a Utopian dream 
to the so-called practical man. What, then, 
is the duty of the Church in this social crisis ? 



58 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

III. 

First of all, to declare afresh and with all 
her might and main the need of love as the 
basal power in the regeneration of society. 
Socialism may or may not be the ultimate 
form for the expression of this economic and 
ethical brotherhood. Personally I am in- 
clined to think that a genuine democracy, 
once Christianized, will own and control 
many of the industrial enterprises now owned 
and directed by private and corporate wealth. 
But Socialism no more than imperialism, or 
capitalism, can honestly and effectively con- 
duct the affairs of government and trade, un- 
less controlled by the supreme law of love. 
^^Love" here, as in the personal religious life, 
''is the fulfilling of the law." 

The spirit of love must find expression in 
a closer identification of the Church with the 
movements for the betterment of civic and 
industrial conditions. The political and so- 
cial atmosphere reacts upon the individual 
religious life. We must seek to save the social 
structure and the individual sinner. The 
Presbyterian Church has set our American 
Churches a splendid example in this respect. 
Not only do we find the discussions of social 
problems going on in her great general bodies ; 
she has also appointed one or more special 
representatives of her body to carry her greet- 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 59 

ings to the labor unions. In a number of 
cities delegates from that Church sit in the 
labor unions, and members of the union ap- 
pear in the public discussions of her ecclesi- 
astical gatherings. Under her leadership the 
tide has begun to turn, and organized labor 
has given a willing ear to the message of the 
Gospel. Misunderstandings and alienations 
have been corrected and healed. Once more 
the hope and belief that the Gospel is for 
rich and poor has been established in the 
hearts of a section of the artisan class. But 
it is only a beginning. The Social Democracy 
of Germany and the militant Socialism of 
the United States deny that religion forms 
any part of the party programs. They pro- 
pose to make their fight without any form of 
religion. We who know how utterly futile 
any political and moral regeneration is with- 
out righteousness and love must identify the 
Church more fully with the cause of the 
poor and disinherited class. The interests 
of the Church are intimately linked with the 
life of the common people. The common 
people, once truly educated, will be the 
power of the future. On grounds of ex- 
pediency, as well as privilege, the Church 
must seek to win and bless the rising throng 
of the industrial world. In Europe, the 
Church and governments stand out against 



60 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

the socialistic movement. In the United 
States the breach is not near so great between 
the Church and labor. Any and every spe- 
cific moral wrong done the working class must 
be a point of attack and rectification by the 
Church. In Pennsylvania and other States 
there are thousands of children engaged in 
enervating labor. The cupidity of parents 
and the indifference of employers should be re- 
buked and the laws against child labor en- 
forced. The drink evil, which wrecks so many 
individual lives and homes, should be con- 
trolled ; if possible, the saloon should be elimi- 
nated. The tenement houses, which wreck 
the health and morals of thousands, should 
be reconstructed on sanitary and ethical plans. 
The fact that one marriage in every twelve in 
the United States ends in divorce should 
arouse the whole Church to the shame and 
disaster which such animalism must engen- 
der in our social life. The movements for the 
protection and rightful support of girlhood 
and old age should enlist the head and heart 
and purse of every true Christian. To 
brighten the existence and gladden the heart 
of the countless throng of poor children of 
our congested centers of city life, to shame 
the selfish rich and support every sane and 
honest attempt to increase the wage and se- 
cure the blessings of education, culture and 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 61 

moral cleanliness for all men are some of the 
glorious opportunities for service now offered 
the Church of Christ. 

As we use that phrase — the Church of 
Christ — our voice grows less confident, for 
that institution as conceived by Jesus and as 
planted by His apostles has been dismembered 
by later ages and no longer is prepared to 
act as a unit. Never before, however, since 
the first century, has the burden and problem 
of the age made the call to federal action on 
the part of the Church so easy or so logical. 
The social problem is the Church's problem 
as never before. Her internal problems are at 
rest, or at least secondary to the outward 
and perplexing call to redeem society. I do 
not plead for the repudiation of any distinc- 
tive denominational note in theology or cultus, 
but I do plead for a federation for social and 
moral service without which I see no hope of 
realizing the kingdom of God. The internal 
contentions and assumptions of religious 
legitimacy which have barred co-operative ef- 
fort are not of Christ, but of human arrogance 
and the devil. We dare not forget the prayer 
of our Master ''That they may all be one; 
even as Thou, Father, art in me." It is a unity 
of life, not identity of individuality, of 
thought or form which constitutes spiritual 
oneness. The things we sacrifice in order to 



62 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

enter into federated social service are not the 
things which God counts great. 

This movement for a truer realization of 
the kingdom of God here and now, is a work 
committed to the whole Church, not to the 
preachers and pastors alone. Church coun- 
cils, vestries, brotherhoods, leaders of every 
name and form must be aroused and forced 
into activity in this cause of Christian broth- 
erhood. There are millions of Churchmen 
who are heinous sinners in this cause. They 
may be respectable, nominal Christians, they 
may be zealous for this or that form of 
Church government, they may be vociferously 
loyal to their denominational history and 
achievements, they may be counted sturdy 
pillars of local support and in Sunday school 
work, but their contribution towards the pres- 
ent-day propaganda for social righteousness 
may be pitiably small. The priest or minister 
is not the sole voice of the Church. The in- 
dividual and the collective membership of 
the Church must voice this great purpose and 
ideal of Christ. Too often the associations 
and operations of the Church have in view 
merely the spiritual culture of her own mem- 
bership, or the enlarging of her numerical 
strength and prestige. Not until the larger 
vision of Christ becomes the ideal and posses- 
sion of the whole Church dare we look for 



THE MODERN CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. 63 

that consideration and honor which may be 
once more given her by the world. 

In this hour of opportunity and crisis, let 
all men having the mind of Christ cast in 
their lot in the great causes of industrial jus- 
tice, social betterment, political reform, com- 
mercial integrity and Christian brotherhood. 
Let the law of love which places duties above 
rights, manhood above dividends, purity above 
power, chastity above pleasure, common weal 
above wealth, contentment above class privi- 
lege, love above commercialism, reign in our 
hearts, our homes, our factories, our boards 
of trade, our senates, our industrial life and 
churches for evermore. 



THE CENTRALITY OF CHRISTIAN 
FELLOWSHIP. 

I. 

Our century has witnessed the rise and fall 
of three promised saviours of society. 
Democracy, science, and socialism have each, 
in turn, been declared the sure roads to civic 
order and social satisfaction. The attain- 
ment of our American autonomy and the 
French Revolution of 1789 made possible the 
experiment in democracy. The Declaration 
of Independence, penned by Jefferson, and 
the Rights of Man, framed by the brilliant 
Frenchman, Dumont, came to downtrodden 
peoples like a new gospel of emancipation. 
In France, feudalism was overthrown, and 
the dogma of the equality of man proclaimed 
from the housetops. No student of history 
can regret or ignore the exhilaration and hope 
created by this bold democratic manifesto. 
The promises made by the French National 
Assembly, and the glittering watchword of 
the Revolution — ''Liberty, Equality, Fra- 
ternity ' ' — came like the evangel of an opulent 
peace to the liberated Parisians. The ideal 
presented was entrancing. The promise of 
(64) 



THE CENTRALITY OF CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP. 65 

political equality and social satisfaction filled 
the imagination with visions of national glory 
and economic abundance. How did the prom- 
ises of democracy fulfill themselves? Let us 
give speedy honor to all the benefits that have 
come to us through the democratic principle. 
Absolutism and class privilege have been 
broken. The sovereignty of the nation has 
been accepted. Every worthy citizen enjoys 
the privilege and duty of political self-expres- 
sion. The people as a whole, and not a titled 
aristocracy, is the first class considered by 
modem legislation. Yes, democracy has ac- 
complished many reforms, and secured for 
us liberties for press and pulpit, school and 
forum. But the conviction deepens that, be- 
yond the form of government, the real ques- 
tion is the question of individual character. 
Dumont himself asked, ''Are all men equal? 
Where is the equality ? Is it in virtue, talents, 
fortune, industry, situation? Are they free 
by nature? So far from it, they are born in 
a state of complete dependence on others, 
from which they are long of being emanci- 
pated." The value of Burke's attack on the 
exaggerations of revolutionary democracy is 
receiving new evidence as we begin to realize 
that no one form of government assures so- 
cial peace and perfection. You can't build 
a cathedral out of chunks of mud. However 
5 



66 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

wise and just may be the plan of a govern- 
ment, the mere form will not save the in- 
dividual or the citizenship as a whole. Democ- 
racy, as a social saviour, has failed us. The 
corruption and poverty of New York is as 
pitiable and great as in Berlin or St. Peters- 
burg. The very champions of democracy cry 
out for a fresh ally in the work of civic and 
social betterment. 

The next aspirant for social regeneration 
was science. Disgusted with the scholastic 
restrictions and methods of Mediasvalism, the 
seekers after nature's origins and actions dis- 
carded the formulas and speculative methods 
of the cloister and bookmen, and, by the path 
of immediate contact with rock and human 
organism, determined to ferret out the secret 
of the universe. ''Give us time, and we will 
tell you the ultimate truths of all life — in- 
organic, organic, and spiritual.'' Science 
promised us the final revelation of truth and 
goodness. In the middle decades of the nine- 
teenth century she was boisterous, if not pos- 
itively arrogant, in her claim to dominate all 
other teachers and leaders in thought. Who 
will deny that Tyndall, Faraday, and Huxley, 
with their inductive method of approach to 
nature, have given us the true principle of 
discovery? Science has made splendid con- 
quests in the realm of lower nature, and given 



THE CENTRALITY OF CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP. 67 

US sure rules and sane ideas in the realm of 
hygiene and civic comfort. The reign of 
law is no small lesson to have taught the 
world. Her lesser gifts of electrical appa- 
ratus, chemical products, studies in primitive 
life forms, and her impressive tracings of the 
evolutionary advance toward man are joy and 
crown enough for any body of human in- 
vestigators. But as a guide and motive power 
in individual and social life, science has failed 
us in our greatest hours of need. Geology, 
biology, sanitation, and vaccination do not 
touch the vitals of life. Proven science has 
no final word to offer on all the deepest and 
ultimate problems of human existence. 
Whence come all things? What is man — his 
conscience, his prayer — and whither is he go- 
ing? Toward these ultimates science is ag- 
nostic or impatient. The first cause, as well 
as the final cause, of the universe are beyond 
her ken. In the presence of poverty, social 
injustice, moral depravity, and the spiritual 
outcries of the soul she sits like the impassive 
sphinx amid the hot, throbbing desert of life. 
Her votaries, who once shouted themselves 
hoarse in the so-called *' Warfare of Science 
and Religion," have finally discovered that, 
on the proper field of science, there is no bat- 
tle with real religion at all; that science can- 
not even advance into the territory of true 



68 THEEE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

religion without acknowledging a superior 
power to mere intellect. Pure science, as a 
social leader, has suffered defeat, and passes 
the ultimate problems of life over to the mor- 
alist and theologian. Man's social and spirit- 
ual questionings demand a more competent 
and effective leader. 

Midway in the century, socialism arose to 
declare that the governmental ownership and 
direction of all the productive and distributive 
forces of the nation would usher in the reign 
of international peace and plenty. Poverty 
was declared the root of all evil. Labor was 
proclaimed the source of all values. Marx's 
book, ^^ Capital,'' became the Bible of the dis- 
contented workmen of Germany, France and 
England. ^^Once reorganize the industrial 
life of the nation," he advised, ''on the basis 
of socialism, and then shall be ushered in the 
reign of social peace and plenty." How 
eagerly the cry was taken up ! How true was 
much of the picture he presented! Poverty, 
hatred, a brutal fight for employment, disease, 
disgust, hopeless submergence of the lowest 
stratum, overcrowded poorhouses, useless 
charities, and aristocratic contempt for demo- 
cratic aspirations — all this was the ground- 
work and reason for industrial reformation. 
To transform the social order then seemed 
simple enough. His shallow philosophy and 



THE CENTRALITY OF CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP. 69 

economic fallacy was hid in a mist of sta- 
tistics and prejudice. Democracy had brought 
political equality; socialism would insure 
equal industrial opportunity. In time, this 
would lead to every social satisfaction. In- 
dustrial organization was declared the pivotal 
point in social well-being. Socialism had not 
yet accepted Hegel 's words : ^ ^ The social or- 
der, however omnipotent it may seem, is lim- 
ited and finite, and man has in him a kindred 
with the eternal. " In a word, man has other 
and higher needs than the merely economic 
and civil satisfactions. ^^Man cannot live by 
bread alone. ' ' No ! nor by education, yachts, 
and brownstone fronts. The range of man's 
needs encompasses all loves, charities and 
purities, both human and Divine. Slowly 
but surely even the leaders of socialism are 
beginning to realize the impotency of merely 
industrial and educational reform for the up- 
lifting and completion of life. 



II. 

What are the factors in Christianity which 
give it the effective and central position among 
all the forces which go to the conserving and 
regeneration of society? In a sentence I re- 
ply — The Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood 
of man, and the regeneration of the individual 



70 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

life. These three factors find their expres- 
sion and fulfilment in a person — Jesus Christ 
and His continuous life throughout the cen- 
turies. 

Christian fellowship has its birth in the 
belief in God — in God the Father, who has 
made of one blood all men who dwell beneath 
the skies. The one Father makes possible the 
many brothers. Eliminate His creatorship 
and will from the brotherhood and it goes 
to pieces upon the rocks of self-interest and 
racial antagonisms. God is the first cause, 
the author of the moral law, and the source 
of love's fellowship. He is the creative center 
of all sympathies and all holy ideals of the 
State. His kingdom is the goal of history. 
He is the answer to humanity's perplexities 
and sufferings and aspirations. Society with- 
out God could be paralleled only by the chaos 
of hurtling planets without a central sun. 
Christian fellowship is unique because it has 
enthroned above it a creative power and in- 
telligence guiding all cosmic and social law. 
Given this incentive and goal of God, the 
Father, and the whole of life is swept within 
the sphere of assured faith and abiding love. 

Christian fellowship is no less unique in 
its conception of the solidarity of society. 
Long before the economic dogma of social 
solidarity became an accepted fact in prac- 



THE CENTRALITY OF CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP. 71 

tical statesmanship, St. Paul had declared: 
^'Ye are all members one of another. If one 
member suffers, all the members suffer with 
it; or one member be honored, all the mem- 
bers rejoice with it.'' It would be wrong to 
quote these words, however, as his belief in 
the modern theory of mutual social depend- 
ence. He believed that, and something more. 
His social solidarity was a spiritual oneness 
in Christ. It was an organism of depend- 
ence, but dependence upon a central spiritual 
Master. It was a brotherhood not for in- 
dividual advantage through an organization, 
but an association of individuals for the up- 
lift of the whole of society. The incarnate 
Son of God was to be its Supreme Head. His 
life and will were to be both law and life. 
As the Father had sent Him into the world 
to be the friend of pauper and sinner, so 
Christ sent His work-fellows into the world 
to encompass with the gospel of peace all 
classes, all conditions, all nationalities. There 
is a brotherhood larger than trade, than 
Church, than black and white, than country: 
that brotherhood is the kingdom of God. I 
call this brotherhood Christian because Jesus 
Christ is the only sufficient propulsive force 
for the realization of such a supernal ideal. 
No man cometh unto the Father but by Him, 
and no man cometh unto his fellow-man truly 



72 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

until lie comes in the spirit of Jesus Christ. 
That modern Christian knight, the Earl of 
Shaftesbury, pushing a costermonger 's cart 
along a London street, in order to express his 
sympathy and gain the experience of his 
hard life; the modern university settlements 
amid the squalor and emptiness of the aver- 
age day-laborer's section of the city; the self- 
consecration of many a city missionary to 
the rescue of criminal and outcast; the ten- 
der consideration of many a high-bred woman 
for the woes of orphaned childhood and more 
helpless old age; the resolute faith of the 
plain deaconess confronted by the hot pas- 
sion and grief of a dissolute woman ; the dar- 
ing attack on slavery and intemperance and 
corporate greed by a disinterested minister; 
the outpoured wealth for pagan souls beyond 
the seas — all declare the supremacy and 
graciousness of that brotherhood which has 
Calvary for its controlling center. 

This recalls the third element in Christian 
fellowship — the regeneration of the individ- 
ual. The elemental defect in our social life 
is not organization, but character. The dis- 
cord which breeds the bulk of our intemper- 
ance, crime and pauperism has its source in 
a distorted moral nature. The root of all 
crime, pride, hate, lust and murder is selfish- 
ness. Great as is the light and power given 



THE CENTRALITY OF CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP. 73 

through education and legislation, not until 
these two splendid arms of the social body are 
directed in their work by a purified heart can 
they accomplish the highest civilization. 
Every member of an educational board or 
labor union knows that the most beneficent 
program of social improvement is a mere 
paper constitution until invigorated and exe- 
cuted by strong moral impulse. It is because 
men are shiftless, arrogant, suspicious and 
piggish that all our fine schemes of co-opera- 
tion and universal culture go to pieces. At 
Exeter Hall, in London, at the close of a 
great labor demonstration, an old mechanic 
was called upon to make the closing speech. 
It was short, but it hit the nail on the head. 
He said: ^^The speakers who have preceded 
me have spoken of the urgent need of legisla- 
tion to redress our wrongs, and of education 
for the workingmen's children. This is all 
right. Legislate, legislate, legislate; educate, 
educate, educate; but let no man forget our 
greatest and most important work is to re- 
generate, regenerate, regenerate." 

The great need of humanity is faith in God 
and man. Without the purity born of God, 
and self-sacrifice like unto the Son of man, the 
social ideals painted by socialists and poets, 
however worthy, are but tantalizing and im- 
possible fantasies. 



74 THBEE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

III. 

To be more specific, permit me to indicate 
several spheres where this Christian fellow- 
ship should be made the central and control- 
ling principle. First, in the industrial life of 
society. The labor question is not a question 
of mere justice. "Whatever may be the form 
of industrial organization, whether it be the 
wages system, co-operation, or State socialism, 
the ultimate question is the question of com- 
plete and satisfied manhood. Though the em- 
ployer may pay every cent of a rightful wage ; 
even if he is willing to share his profits with 
his employees; if in the co-operative estab- 
lishment all the shareholders get their prom- 
ised part of interest and benefit on the in- 
vested capital; granted, if you will, the es- 
tablishment of nationalism or socialism in the 
industrial world, where ^'each according to 
his ability, and all according to their need" 
receive the benefits of production and con- 
sumption, still no true man would be satisfied 
with bare justice. There must he a reciproc- 
ity of manJiood as well as of dollars before we 
can look for social peace. To give a man his 
wages and refuse him respect will not satisfy 
for long. To establish a public bath by the 
writing of a liberal check, and then to write 
with the same pen a supercilious article on 
''the lower classes'' is a contradiction in form, 



THE CENTRALITY OF CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP. 75 

if not in spirit, which will not be tolerated. 
To give a man his price of labor and not your 
praise of his workmanship is withholding the 
truest and most pleasing incentive to toil. 
Better than dividing your fortune is the dis- 
tribution of manly sympathy. It is the in- 
visible part of your estate, the part which the 
law, or the strike, cannot touch, which the 
workingman really craves. I know they re- 
pudiate charity, and demand, in their plat- 
forms '^mere justice,'' but all the while they 
want something much richer and truer than 
simple justice. Justice does not cast out envy 
and jealousy. Among millionaires greed and 
hate are no strangers. Equal wealth is no 
defence against civil and moral distraction. 
The labor problem is pre-eminently a moral 
problem. It is a cry for the recognition of 
the essential manhood of every true worker 
in every sphere of life. 

Now it is to this fundamental need that 
Christian fellowship directs its beneficent 
powers. ^^One Father, one blood and one 
destiny." With these words emblazoned on 
its banner, it leads the world's teachers and 
philanthropists, its educators and artisans, its 
foremen and managers, its superintendents 
and boards of directors, into that larger jus- 
tice which is sometimes mercy, but always 
love. 



76 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

I wish, in the second place, to show the cen- 
trality of Christian fellowship in all move- 
ments toward a better civic order and morale. 
Municipal pride and nnjust taxation may 
arouse to spasmodic reform. Revelations of 
corrupt official life have shocked us into moral 
consciousness. Huge steals by bibulous al- 
dermen and interested councilmen may cause 
us to rally around the public treasury, but 
neither civic pride nor a rifled corporation 
furnish a heroic or continuous motive in the 
fight for law and order. It is not institutions, 
but men, that most need saving. It is be- 
cause such abuse of office breeds moral rot 
in every avenue of public and private life 
that we seek to reform an administration or 
an institution. I am sure our Civil War took 
on nobler proportions when, added to the pur- 
pose of preserving the Union, it became a 
battle for the rights of man, the liberation of 
four million slaves. It is because the city 
exists for man, not man for the city, that 
the arousement of the public conscience is 
such a splendid event in our national life. "We 
Americans must never forget who has been 
our prophet in this new crusade. It is a man 
fired by Christian faith and determination. 
Eoosevelt is first and foremost a lover of men, 
this makes him invincible in his fight for 
probity and decency in the administration of 



THE CENTRALITY OF CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP. 77 

public trusts. It is not until we love men 
supremely that we can conquer our fear and 
sloth and march forth to retake the citadel 
of public justice. Christian fellowship an- 
swers the question, '^Who is my neighbor?'' 
by declaring, ^* Every tempted boy and trem- 
ulous girl, every unfortunate of the street and 
asylum, every lodger in our tenement-houses 
and majestic avenues, every bullied apple- 
woman and garment-worker, every boss-taxed 
clerk and harried millionaire.'' What are 
clean, smooth pavements worth, save as re- 
lated to man's health and easy walk? What 
are wharves and piers, save as they make easy 
access for the cheapened food for the citizen? 
What significance has electric plant and water 
supply, save as they guide and refresh the 
homeward bound and thirsty? Why build 
the stately palaces of state, if not to impress 
the sense of reverence for law and order? 
Why paint our pictures and rear our art gal- 
leries, if not to call out man's latent power 
of observation and love of beauty ? Why con- 
struct our noble cathedrals, unless to tell the 
story of man's unquenchable aspiration for 
the beauty of holiness? Man, it is man back 
of all sciences, arts, and institutions that gives 
vigor and value to all our toil and heroism. 
The truest patriotism is bred of Christian fel- 
lowship. Back of so much dirt and rock, 



78 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

streets and houses, charters and constitutions, 
stands a human history made by men of our 
own blood, and whose lives are our heritage, 
calling out our reverence and love and de- 
votion to the arms and institutions they be- 
queathed. Well m.ay Taylor sing: 

'^ The bravest are the tenderest; 
The loving are the daring.'' 

May I mention another realm of thought 
and action where fellowship holds the central 
place in the co-ordination of divided forces? 
I refer to the Christian Church. A union of 
the sects of Christendom or a synthesis of their 
various confessions is, in my own mind, a 
waning belief. I am still hoping against hope. 
There stands that prayer of Christ: ^'That 
they all may be one. ' ' So long as that prayer 
stands in Holy Scripture, so long I am com- 
pelled to strive for the spiritual oneness of 
all believers. I am not sure just what He 
means. Good men tell us it means organic 
union, having one institution, and that organ- 
ized on the Episcopal plan. Well, I am ready 
for that, provided the Episcopus is not an 
arrant autocrat. But would any form of 
church organization make us one in Christ 
Jesus? No; we need something more than 
polity. Some scholars would carry us back 
of all denominational history and creed-mak- 
ing, and put us down in the first century of 



THE CENTRALITY OF CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP. 79 

the Church, and bid us be satisfied with the 
confession of the first disciples. But what 
w^as that confession? And, if we had it, 
would that insure Christian unity? No, not 
so long as men are born with their varied men- 
tal and emotional tendencies. There is some- 
thing more precious than uniformity, and that 
is Christian liberty. What, then, must be 
the central power for the unifying of Chris- 
tian activity ? One thing is certain : we must 
have more Christian unity before we dare ex- 
pect more Church unity. Here our cherished 
power of love, which is considerate, humble, 
gentle, forgiving, generous and full of faith, 
is the dominant factor in the co-ordinating of 
individual Churchmen. It is to the men of 
this large Christian love in all the denomina- 
tions, and not to the narrow ecclesiastics, that 
we look for that spiritual unity contemplated 
by Jesus. For '^Christ" first, for 'Hhe 
Church" second, for ^^my denomination ' ' 
last. This must be the logical and affectional 
order if we are really serious about the union 
of Christendom. One thing is certain : where 
there is constant rancor and self-assertion 
there can be no Christ. The faith once de- 
livered to the saints was not an elaborated 
creed or a hierarchy of spiritual prerogatives, 
but an abounding trust in Jesus Christ as the 
Saviour and Lover of all mankind. 



80 THREE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

The nearer we get to Christ, the closer will 
we come to one another. We must have a 
federation of the churches before we can have 
a unification of the Church, 

The last sphere to be mentioned, in which 
I believe Christian love must be made the cen- 
tral and controlling motive of action, is in 
the individual life. Whether it be a system 
of theology or a single Christian life that is to 
tell for God, the love of God in Christ Jesus 
must be put at the core of the structure. The 
doctrine of the Incarnation has taken on new 
significance in our age, because the recovered 
Christ has been seen to be the personalization 
of God^s love. Among the Christian graces 
Paul makes charity, or love, supreme. Above 
the faith which clings to Christ for re- 
demption, beyond the hope which strains its 
prophetic eye into the age of the completed 
kingdom, reigns the constraining power of 
love — love which suffereth long and is kind; 
love which envieth not, vaunteth not itself, is 
not puffed up ; love which endureth all things 
and never faileth. Prophecies may fail, tongues 
may cease, knowledge shall vanish away; but 
love shall abide triumphant over every ill and 
sorrow of life. What force is more needed 
in our daily lives than just this divine at- 
tribute ? If men were ruled by this principle 
in the marts of trade, in the realm of science, 



THE CENTRALITY OF CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP. 81 

in the home, in the church, in the university, 
on the playground, in the social circle, what 
a revolution would be accomplished, how like 
a new Eden this old brutal world would be- 
come! ''A little child shall lead them." The 
day seems far off as yet. The vast standing 
armies of Europe, the struggle for existence 
among the masses of men, the ruthless li- 
centiousness among all classes, the wasteful 
luxury among the unemployed rich and im- 
provident poor, the blank materialism among 
so many, the reckless race for power among 
our political aspirants, seem to be all too re- 
sistless a combination to be halted and sub- 
dued by anything short of the Archangel 
Michael himself. But we hold by our central 
principle — ^^Not by might, nor by power, but 
by my word, saith the Lord of hosts." Let 
us bring all our learning, all our discovery, 
all our art, all our science, all our legislation, 
all our poetry, to this central figure of love. 
Let her firm warm hand be laid in consecra- 
tion on all your talents and opportunities and 
struggles. Let her lips rest upon your brow 
before you go forth to the battle of life. In 
her name Paul, John, Jesus, won their glori- 
ous triumphs over Pharisaism, Grecian 
thought, and Satan's power. By love's power 
the gory amphitheatre of Nero was closed 
and Caesar's palace captured. By love's 
6 



82 THBEE VITAL PROBLEMS. 

might the German forests were pierced and 
made vocal by Christian song; by love's ven- 
ture England's isles were redeemed from 
brutal butcheries and darksome faiths. By 
love's propulsion out into east, west, north 
and south, the heralds of the Cross have gone 
to bring civilization and joy to haunts of vice 
and pestilence. By love's might Christ came 
down and bore in His uplifted hands a whole 
world's sin up to the pardoning throne of God. 
And ever since, in nursery and on battle-field, 
the thrill of His redeeming love has given 
nerve and faith to mother love and manhood's 
noblest sacrifice. 

I remember standing before the altar of 
Westminster Abbey. Behind that altar were 
the tombs of England's illustrious kings and 
queens, the shrine of Edward, and the chapel 
where the body of Henry of Agincourt sleeps 
its glorious sleep. To my left, in the north 
transept, were the marble statues of Eng- 
land's great statesmen and naval heroes. 
Turning toward the south transept, the tab- 
lets and busts of ''Poets' Corner" recalled the 
pilgrims of Chaucer, the immortal dramas of 
Shakespeare, and the heroics of Milton. 
Standing in the north aisle of the Abbey, one 
looks upon the two floor-slabs which bear the 
names of Darwin and of Livingstone, the 
monuments to Harvey and to Pitt. Down the 



THE CENTRALITY OF CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP. 83 

main aisle, as we approached once more the 
altar, bard, soldier, musician, actor, physicist 
and philanthropist in silent effigy look down 
upon us. Around, above us, rear in sculpt- 
ured symmetry, a forest of stone columns and 
over-arching traceries. The music of the great 
organ behind us commenced to move and 
swell into every bay and nook of the ancient 
minster. Slowly and unconsciously our eyes 
turned to the very center and heart of this vast 
mausoleum of the world's great masters — ^the 
reredos behind the altar. There, depicted by 
the, artist's brushy with His first disciples, 
stood the Man of Galilee, with hands out- 
stretched to bless and to command the inmates 
of that vast cathedral. Yes, He was and is 
the true center of the world's best thought 
and life. He is the commanding center of all 
noble action and discovery. The uplifted 
Face, in the center of the world's history, 
gives significance to every war and constitu- 
tion, every grief and joy, every struggle for 
the emancipation of man, every poem and 
oratorio, every love and hate, every drama 
acted and king dethroned, every passion con- 
quered, and every prayer wrung from the 
heart of stricken men. Here, at last, in His 
life, we have found the center of all loves and 
divine fellowships. 



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